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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Nottinghamshire and across the UK. We work across the county for school trusts, sports clubs and community facilities.
We are specialists rather than generalists, which after nearly forty years means a depth of knowledge on sports and commercial timber floors that a general contractor cannot match. Every stage is completed in-house. We do not quote for domestic work; Ryan’s Restorations handles that side.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
A noisy floor is usually telling you something structural. Squeaking generally traces to fixings working loose or boards moving against one another; a hollow or drumming sound points to loss of contact with the sub-floor beneath.
Neither is fixed by refinishing the surface. We identify the cause during survey and address the fixings or build-up directly, which is frequently far cheaper than the refurbishment people assume they need.
A ball that dies in one part of the court indicates the resilient layer beneath has compressed or failed there, or a batten has lost contact. It is a structural problem and resurfacing will not touch it.
We map dead areas by working across the whole floor rather than spot-checking, then open up and repair the build-up beneath before any surface work. Done properly the area performs identically to the rest of the court afterwards.
Sanding and sealing addresses the surface, and nothing else. It will not cure movement, dead spots, moisture ingress, failed fixings or a sub-floor that has deteriorated.
Contractors who quote refinishing for those problems either have not diagnosed them or would rather not mention them. We survey for structural causes first, because a beautiful new finish over an unresolved fault is money spent twice.
The sports hall floor at De Wint School had reached the end of its seal: grey through the middle, markings closer to guesswork than instruction, and a surface that felt slippery however often it was cleaned.
We sanded it back to clean timber, repaired what needed repairing, resealed and re-marked. The hall reopened with a deep, glossy finish that reads as newly installed, delivered inside a planned holiday window.
~ Matthew Evans
An outstanding company to deal with and they couldn’t have been better to work with. St George’s Ascot now has a stunning new sports hall floor and we are delighted. From quote, support, delivery and after sales, the Team has been brilliant. Thank you. 
~ James Anderson
Basketball wears a floor in two rectangles. The keys take every rebound, post move and landing, and the finish there can be through to bare timber while the rest of the court still looks respectable.
We mark to current FIBA dimensions: a 28 by 15 metre court with the three point line at 6.75 metres from the centre of the basket, reducing to 6.6 metres in the corners. The restricted area is a rectangle with a no charge semi circle, not the trapezoid still found in many older halls, which is usually the giveaway that a court has not been set out properly in decades.
Sole marking is the other characteristic problem. Basketball shoes grip, and that grip transfers rubber across the whole surface. On a well sealed floor it cleans off. Where the seal has gone thin it works into open grain and stops coming out.
A coloured key or a crest at centre court is applied between coats so it wears with the floor rather than scuffing off, and it costs least while the floor is already open.
The question we are asked most is when the floor can be used again, and the honest answer is that it depends on the system, which is why we put it in writing rather than giving a rule of thumb.
As a general guide, light foot traffic is possible around twenty four hours after the final coat. Full use, with equipment wheeled back and posts refitted, is usually seventy two hours. Some systems are faster and some are slower, and cold or humid conditions extend both.
Walking on a floor too early is the single most common cause of a job needing touching up, and it is entirely avoidable. Footprints in a curing seal do not polish out. Nor do the marks left by equipment put back a day early.
So we agree access arrangements before we start, we sign the room, and where necessary we arrange for it to be locked. It is not us being difficult. It is the difference between a floor that hands over properly and one that needs us back.
Commercial and public buildings need documentation, and providing it in advance rather than on request is part of what distinguishes a specialist contractor.
Before the work you receive method statements and risk assessments specific to the job rather than a generic template, COSHH data sheets for every product we will bring on site, and copies of our public liability and employers liability insurance.
For school sites we provide DBS details for the staff attending, and we work to whatever additional safeguarding arrangements the school or trust requires. Our teams are used to signing in, wearing identification and staying within agreed areas.
On main contractor sites we work to site rules, attend inductions and provide progress reporting in whatever format the contract requires.
At handover you get the product data sheets, the cure times in writing, aftercare guidance and, where requested, the pendulum slip resistance certificate. It goes into the facilities file as a complete record rather than a folder of assurances.
Netball is played on hard stops. The footwork rule means players land, plant and pivot rather than running through the ball, which puts a specific demand on the surface.
Grip has to be predictable. A player receiving in the goal circle needs to stop dead and trust the floor, and a surface polished smooth through the centre third is a genuine injury risk rather than an inconvenience.
A full court is 30.5 by 15.25 metres in three equal thirds, with a 0.9 metre centre circle and goal circles of 4.9 metre radius. Lines are 50 millimetres wide, and because the lines count as part of the area they enclose, marking them thin genuinely changes the game.
England Netball asks for 3.05 metres of run off for competitive play, which few school halls achieve. Where a hall cannot take a full court we mark a proportionally reduced court or lay out for a junior format, rather than marking something tight to the walls that is unsafe to play on.
Nottinghamshire brings us academy trust estates, school sports halls, leisure facilities and a considerable amount of older community building stock.
Trust work is the largest strand. Where one organisation holds ten or twenty sports halls of differing ages and conditions, the most useful thing we can do is survey the whole estate and produce a costed priority order. It converts an unpredictable liability into a programme that phases across budget years.
Individual school halls come to us for the usual reasons, and the recurring one is a hall that has gone well over a decade without a proper refinish. Once the seal has worn through, dirt sits in open timber and the staining eventually goes beyond what sanding will remove.
Granwood is common in the older school and church halls here, and it is regularly written off when it should not be. A Granwood floor with sound blocks and an intact bitumen bed is almost always worth restoring, and it costs a fraction of replacement.
Village halls and club buildings make up the rest.
Nottinghamshire has a good deal of older school and church hall stock, so the project worth knowing about is St George School in Ascot.
That hall had a Granwood floor which had been written off by others as due for replacement. Granwood is a composite block of wood flour and cement laid in a bitumen bed, and it behaves nothing like timber. Sanded aggressively it is permanently damaged, and its bed softens with heat. We assessed the blocks, rebedded the loose ones, replaced those that had broken up, prepared the surface with appropriate abrasives and applied a modified epoxy coating with the markings sealed within the system.
The floor now looks renewed and has years left in it, for a fraction of what replacement would have cost once the bitumen bed removal was accounted for.
For academy halls the closer comparison is De Wint School, where the constraint was the term date and the work was a straightforward refinish with markings reset from measured dimensions.
Relining is the natural moment to add the things that make a hall look like yours rather than institutional, because the setting out is being done anyway.
A school crest or club badge at centre court is one of the few changes that genuinely lifts a room for a modest cost. It is painted from your own artwork between coats of seal, so it sits under the final lacquer and wears at the same rate as the floor around it. Anything applied over a finished floor scuffs and peels within a season, whatever the supplier claims.
Colouring the key or a zone works the same way and has the same effect. A filled key in a contrasting colour makes a court read instantly and looks designed rather than accidental.
We scale the artwork properly to the circle or area it is going into and show you a layout before anything goes down, with colours matched to your own brand rather than approximated from a chart.
The honest answer is that we cannot know until we have measured. What we can say is that we price the least expensive effective option as well as the full one, so the decision is yours rather than ours, and that the figure we give you is the figure you pay.
We do, and the wider region with it. Work further from our base is organised as a single concentrated programme so nothing is left unfinished awaiting a return trip, and travel is included in the quoted price.
We can give indicative guidance from photographs and hall dimensions, which is often enough to plan a budget. A firm fixed price needs a site survey, which is free.
Solid and engineered timber from Junckers, Boen and Havwoods, plus vinyl, polyurethane and lino, and specialist coating systems for Granwood and composite block floors.
Usually cleaning residue rather than a worn seal. Over-strength product or the wrong pH leaves a film that reduces grip. A deep clean normally restores it, and a slip test confirms it objectively.
Heating dries the air, the boards give up moisture and shrink. It is normal seasonal movement rather than a fault, and it closes again in summer. Keeping the building humidity more stable reduces it.
Yes. We survey the slab for level and moisture first, install mitigation where readings require it, and specify the system to the actual timetable of the hall rather than to a standard answer.
Constantly. Summer holidays and half terms are when most of our school work happens, and summer slots book up early. If you are planning for next year it is worth speaking to us in January rather than June.
Usually a two pack polyurethane in a satin sheen. It holds slip resistance and appearance under heavy use, and satin hides scuffing and avoids glare under the LED lighting most halls now have.
Yes, routinely. A great deal of our leisure centre and university work is done overnight so the facility keeps trading. It costs a little more in labour and usually saves a great deal more in lost income.
It depends on board thickness and how much has already been removed. A solid strip floor might take six to eight full sands across its life. We measure the remaining wear layer at survey.
Book a free survey of your floor in Nottinghamshire and we will tell you honestly what it needs, what it will cost and how quickly it can happen. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.